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A Diva in the Family

My book is called A Diva in the Family and it's about my aunt, Margaret Tynes. She had a phenomenal international career as a singer in opera, jazz and theater for over fifty years. A graduate of North Carolina A&T State University (BA 1939) and Columbia University (MA 1944), she starred as Harry Belafonte’s leading lady off-Broadway (see the picture below) in a show he produced called Sing Man, Sing! She also recorded a jazz suite called A Drum is a Woman with Duke Ellington and made several appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show. In 1961, she gained international acclaim as Salomé at the Spoleto Festival of the Two Worlds in Italy, where she lived for more than forty years.

via anovelista.blogspot.com

I am always stunned, thrilled actually, when I hear from someone who has heard of my aunt Margaret Tynes, the subject of my book A Diva in the Family.  I have a stack of lovely rejection letters from agents and publishers for it ("Well, there is no bio of Leontyne Price yet and no one has ever heard of your aunt...")  Have you ever been in Borders or Barnes & Noble and come across a memoir about someone's mother or aunt whom you have never heard of? Exactly...

Margaret Tynes and Harry Belafonte from Sing Man, Sing! 1956

Right now, I am working on another book project - a coffee table book. Very 55 Secret Street in nature.  I'll tell you more about it later.  

How short can the short story get?

For the next three days, author Rick Moody will be delivering a new short story in 153 Tweets, in hourly increments. Mr. Moody’s Twitter story is being written for the new literary journal Electric Literature, a multi-media publication that delivers new fiction both in print and to iPhones, Kindles and other e-readers. The journal has published work by celebrated writers like Lydia Davis, Colson Whitehead and Michael Cunningham.

via blogs.wsj.com

This sounds like an interesting experiment.You can follow his tweets here: @ElectricLit.